If like millions of people you use Gmail to schedule meetings, and Google Calendar to keep track of them, this little interface improvement in Gmail is going to save you a bucket of time and headaches.

The scheduling workflow in Google products is messy. You're constantly switching between email messages and your calendar to see if a proposed meeting place and time is convenient. And going back and forth is a huge time suck.

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Luckily, Google used its data crunching prowess to devise a fix to this silly problem. Google will now start parsing your emails for dates, and lightly highlight what it identifies as events in your email. If you click on one of those dates, a little dialogue will pop up showing you the day and what else you've got going on. If the time works, you can schedule it up—all without ever taking your eyes of the message.

The update is rolling out to US English users over the next week, with expanded language support on its way. It can't come soon enough. [Google]